Hi, Feczak Szabolcs <feczo@xxxxx> writes: >> AFAIK, there are no plans to do such an improvement. Considered that >> we still lack some funding for our developers conference this summer, >> perhaps we could be persuaded to give it a try. > > Ok, what do you need to be more persuaded ? First of all, sorry for not getting back to you earlier. You raised a very difficult question. To understand the difficulties, you need to know that we are very close to a major release and that we are more or less feature-frozen. More or less means that there are a few outstanding features that have long been planned to go in and that people are already working on. These features are supposed to go into the next release. Everything else is postponed for after the release. What you are asking for is a major change. It requires to introduce a new framework to the core that provides scaled-down previews of all drawables. A lot of operations like for example transformations would benefit from such a framework so we definitely want to introduce it at some point. However I feel that it is too much of a change right now. It would delay the release and we are already behind our time schedule. So basically, what we need to be more persuaded is time. To some extent, time can be bought. You could for example offer money to GIMP developers in order to allow them to work full-time on this feature. That would not necessarily persuade me and Mitch as the maintainers to let the feature go in before the next release. But if someone would come up with a well-designed and working patch, how could we not accept it? We haven't yet decided how we want to proceed after the release. This is something we will discuss at the GIMP Developers Conference this summer. As I've said, we are still looking for sponsors for this conference. Most developers are not able to pay for their travel costs, so we are dependant on funding. Of course we would appreciate if you'd decide to help us with the conference but I can not promise you any features let alone a time schedule for features. Your funding would certainly help GIMP development and we would be happy to mention your company's name as a conference sponsor. Your money would certainly help to improve GIMP but I cannot sell any features to you. Especially not at this point of development. I'd be happy if you nevertheless decided to help us with the conference. We already got some fundings from the FSF but we are still lacking about 5000 EUR. That's not much for a larger company and any donations would help. So if you, or anyone else reading this, is willing and able to help, please let us know. Sven
